Interface Ontology

Abstract / Overview

Interface Ontology is a research area that studies the interface not merely as a device or medium, but as a condition through which different beings, phases, bodies, environments, information, and institutions enter contact while retaining difference. It examines how new relations, meanings, values, and realities can emerge through such contact, with particular attention to boundaries, connectivity, visibility, embodiment, space, language, technology, and artistic practice.

Full Text

Interface Ontology is a research area within Generative Studies that examines how different beings and conditions enter contact and how new relations, meanings, values, and realities can emerge through that contact.

The word interface is often used for a technical surface that connects humans with machines, users with information, or one device with another.

Within Generative Studies, however, the interface is treated as a broader ontological research concept.

An interface is a condition of contact.

It can involve self and other, humans and environments, bodies and information, subjects and objects, reality and screens, life and art, or concrete situations and abstract systems.

Contact does not require complete identity.

If distinct conditions became completely identical, the space for a new relation could disappear.

An interface is therefore not a place where difference is erased.

It is a condition through which difference can remain while relation becomes possible.

This concern connects directly with Generative Topological Ontology.

Generative Topological Ontology studies being through relation, connectivity, boundaries, and phase difference.

Interface Ontology studies how distinct phases enter concrete contact and what new relational conditions may emerge through such contact.

When A and B enter contact, they do not always remain only as two separate terms.

A new condition C can emerge.

C is not simply the sum of A and B.

Its emergence can also alter the meaning and position of A and B.

An interface is therefore more than a channel joining already established entities.

It can itself become a condition of generation.

For this reason, interfaces are not neutral.

The form of a boundary affects what can connect, what remains separate, what becomes visible, and what remains hidden.

These conditions influence the reality that can later take form.

An interface does not merely display a completed reality.

It participates in the formation of reality.

This problem is not limited to digital screens.

Bodies, language, architecture, roads, institutions, places of lodging, artworks, rituals, and social roles can also function as interfaces through which different conditions enter contact.

The body is a primary interface.

It is not simply a wall separating self from world.

Seeing, hearing, touching, moving, pain, and pleasure are forms of contact.

Through bodily contact, both self-understanding and relation to the world can change.

The body is a boundary through which the self opens toward the world.

It is also a boundary through which the world affects the self.

The limits of the body are therefore not entirely fixed.

Tools can extend bodily action.

Screens and networks can allow distant events to affect bodily experience.

The boundary of self and world can shift through relation.

Language is another important interface.

Language does not merely transport a meaning that already exists internally.

It participates in what becomes recognizable as an object, how the world is differentiated, and what receives meaning.

Language therefore participates in meaning generation.

This concern connects with the Theory of Language Derivatives.

Language can anticipate futures, possibilities, evaluations, and values that have not yet taken stable form.

Such anticipation can prepare new realities.

At the same time, language can produce expanding structures of meaning when contact with concrete reality becomes weak.

Renewed contact with reality then becomes important.

Information technology makes the role of interfaces especially visible.

Screens and user interfaces do not present information in a fully transparent form.

They select, arrange, emphasize, classify, and conceal.

Interface design can therefore influence what users recognize as reality.

This becomes important in search systems, social platforms, recommendation systems, artificial intelligence, and generative AI.

People do not only operate interfaces.

Interfaces can also shape attention, judgment, affect, and action.

The relation of humans and technology therefore moves in more than one direction.

People shape technical systems, while technical interfaces can alter the conditions of human experience.

This structure connects with Self-Externalization.

People externalize themselves through screens, language, artworks, records, and institutions.

Externalized forms can later act upon the self again.

The interface is a contact surface through which this circulation can occur.

Boundaries are central to this research.

A boundary is not only a line of separation.

It can distinguish inside from outside, self from other, or subject from environment while also allowing contact.

Separation and connection can therefore coexist within the same boundary.

This dual condition is important.

If separation becomes absolute, generation through contact cannot occur.

If identity becomes complete, difference disappears.

Generation becomes possible when difference remains and contact is still possible.

This structure connects with Co-Being.

Co-Being is not simply the presence of several beings in the same space.

It concerns conditions in which distinct beings retain difference while forming relations that participate in the generation of reality.

An interface can be studied as a local site where such Co-Being takes place.

Sensibility can also function as an interface.

People do not always understand the world logically before entering relation with it.

Atmosphere, discomfort, attraction, allure, fear, security, trust, and felt distance can already shape relation.

Such sensations connect people with the world before they become fully explicit concepts.

Sensibility can therefore be studied as an interface prior to complete conceptualization.

Space also functions in this way.

Architecture and cities are not neutral containers.

Entrances, walls, corridors, windows, roads, seats, empty places, and distances affect who can encounter whom, what can be seen, and what actions become possible.

Spatial design is therefore also relational design.

Sayama Aesthetics School makes this problem particularly visible.

Lodging, architecture, everyday life, visitors, locality, artistic work, bodily experience, and institutional conditions come into contact within the same place.

The site is not only a place of lodging.

It is also not a museum that separates artworks from ordinary life.

Everyday reality itself becomes a field of presentation.

In this sense, Sayama Aesthetics School can be studied as a real-world display.

The boundaries of artwork and life, artist and visitor, facility and locality do not simply disappear.

They become movable.

New relations become possible through this movement of boundaries.

Web Installation also provides an earlier practical basis for Interface Ontology.

The web can function not merely as a location for information, but as a site of contact involving informational and physical realities.

Information presented through the web can influence action in physical reality.

Events in physical reality can then return to the web as records.

A circulation emerges.

Smart Art raised related questions concerning technology, bodies, user experience, human limitation, and complexity.

The issue was not only how to make technology more advanced.

It was also how humans encounter technology through interfaces.

Derivative Art studies conditions in which value and meaning can move away from concrete objects and expand through informational and institutional structures.

The interface then becomes important as a condition for reconnecting abstract value with concrete reality.

DAA studies possibilities for artistic generation that do not rely only on a centralized author or institution.

Bonsai Heimat connects plants, time, place, everyday life, memory, and authorship through long-term relation.

These practices treat the interface not merely as a screen or device, but as a condition through which relations in reality can be changed.

An artwork can also be studied as an interface.

If an artwork is treated only as a completed object, the viewer remains positioned as someone who observes it.

If the artwork is approached as an interface, the main question becomes what kinds of contact it makes possible.

Relations involving viewers, space, bodies, time, memory, institutions, and society can emerge.

The artwork then becomes more than a container of meaning.

It can become an occasion that opens new possibilities of connection.

This concern connects with Workhood.

Workhood is not treated as a fixed property located entirely inside an object.

It can emerge when something changes relations involving sensation, action, memory, everyday life, or society.

An artwork can also be understood as a wound created through contact involving the self and what is not the self.

Contact with a work can make a complete return to the previous condition impossible.

That irreversible change can become a new possibility of connection.

Interfaces therefore include time.

Contact is not only a spatial event.

A formed relation can remain as history and influence later relations.

An interface is therefore both a spatial boundary and a temporal condition of generation.

This concern connects with irreversibility in Generative Topological Ontology.

Interface Ontology also reconsiders the meaning of design.

Designing an interface is not only a matter of creating an easy-to-use screen.

It involves shaping what becomes visible, what remains hidden, who can enter contact, what can connect, what remains separate, and what kinds of action become possible.

Interface design can therefore become a form of reality design.

Power is also involved.

Those who control interfaces can influence possibilities of connection.

Search visibility, access to speech, systems of evaluation, and the arrangement of information can all shape perceptions of reality.

Interface Ontology therefore connects not only with technology, but also with institutions, value, and power gradients.

The purpose of Interface Ontology within Generative Studies is not to unify different conditions into one state.

It studies conditions through which difference can remain while contact becomes possible.

Through such contact, new relations, meanings, values, and realities can emerge.

An interface is not merely an auxiliary device placed in the middle of two completed things.

It is a site where generation itself can occur.

The interval separating distinct forms of existence is not empty.

That interval can become the generative surface through which new reality takes form.

Keywords

Interface Ontology; interface; boundary; contact; connectivity; difference; body; space; information; language; institution; reality generation; artistic practice